5 Pathetic Alien Invaders

Unless you count the cast of Jersey Shore, alien cultures have not actually invaded Earth yet. It’s all the creative territory of television, movies, comic books, and paranoid hippies who have smoked a pound of grass a day for twenty years.

Still, in case aliens ever do invade us for real, we all better pray they’re on the intellectual level of these five fictional invaders. If they are, then we will officially have nothing to worry about, as aliens like these couldn’t successfully invade a preschool, never mind a whole planet.

1.

The Monstars (Space Jam)

Do you remember the movie Space Jam? If so, just run head-first into a stone wall a few dozen times. There. Takes care of that little problem, now doesn’t it?

The basic premise behind this movie is that tiny little pipsqueak aliens are threatening to steal the Looney Tunes away from us for their own amusement. For reasons that only they fully comprehend, the Tunes put their freedom on the line in a pick-up basketball game. Just like how George Washington and his soldiers dunked on the heads of the British to gain freedom for America! Thomas Jefferson had a mean jumpshot, we hear.

Sadly, the aliens quickly realize that being tiny will do them no good against a whole bunch of Tunes much bigger than they, so they use their alien powers to steal the athletic ability of several NBA superstars such as Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing. This not only transforms them into pretty good basketball players who weren’t quite good enough to win a title, but also turns them into gargantuan, overly muscled monstrous freaks:

Almost like this was an NBA game, really.

The Tunes, realizing they’re screwed now, recruit Michael Jordan to play for them, and here’s where the Monstars are revealed to be incompetent morons who can’t be trusted with anything. At the time of the movie, Jordan was retired, but only recently so: he was still the greatest player on Earth by leaps and bounds. Why did the Monstars not steal his ability then? Perhaps he was too busy filming another underwear commercial for the aliens to even notice him. But they could’ve searched at least a little bit, because now he’s on the other side, ready to throw down with cartoon rabbits and ducks backing him up.

Unless you’re actually brain-dead, you know what happens: Jordan and the Tunes win the game after posting an amazing 40-point comeback in the second half. This simply should not have been the case. It doesn’t matter how badly the Tunes wanted it. It doesn’t matter that Michael Jordan was playing and that he’s really, really good at basketball. It doesn’t even matter that Bill Murray came in as a last-minute substitute because Foghorn Leghorn got squashed one time too many.

The simple fact is: THESE ALIENS WERE SUPER-STRONG GIANTS. Most of them were even taller than the basket. They could have simply lobbed the ball overhead to each other over and over again, scored 300 points, and called it a night. Yet they lost anyway because they got lazy near the end and let a bunch of drawings plus Bill Murray score on them at will. They deserved whatever punishment awaited them back at their home planet; it’s the least that can happen after disgracing oddly shaped muscled-bound freaks everywhere.

2.

Zim (Invader Zim)

Irkins, the alien race Zim is a member of, devote their entire lives and planet to organizing and executing endless invasions of other planets. That’s pretty much all they do, as intergalactic planetary invasion tends to leave very little time for side hobbies like fly-fishing or sticking small models of boats into large bottles.

The Irkins are quite successful in what they do, except for Zim. Simply put, Zim is a complete idiot who has no idea how to handle anything resembling an alien invasion. He thinks absolutely nothing through in any way before acting, and this almost always results in failure. Any machine he gets his hands on either gets destroyed or destroys a mess of important stuff it wasn’t meant to destroy, like an entire Irkin city.

However, since he’s also completely insane and a megalomaniac, he appears to have no idea whatsoever that he sucks at his species’ natural calling. In truth, he’s convinced himself that he’s the greatest invader of all time, and it’s everybody else’s problem if they don’t realize that.

Zim pondering his latest delusion of grandeur

Tired of his destructive incompetence, the Irkin leaders assign him a fake invasion, thinking he’ll get lost in space and die there. Naturally, he finds a planet and, naturally, it’s ours. Also naturally, he manages to conquer absolutely nothing while convincing himself he’s slowly conquering everything. It probably didn’t help him that, while most Irkins received a state-of-the-art evil robot to aid them in their quest, Zim received GIR, a defective retard-bot with a brain made out of anything the Irkin leaders just happened to find on the floor that day. GIR existed mainly to spout insane non-sequiturs about tacos and waffles while dressed in a clearly fake dog suit to “blend in.”

Didn’t work.

The show was cancelled before a conclusion to the story could be reached, but Zim clearly wasn’t successfully invading anything anytime soon, so we can all safely assume he does not have a sudden epiphany of planet-conquering intelligence. But Earth does offer waffles a-plenty, so he’s at least eating well.

3.

Mister Mxyzptlk (Superman)

Before we delve into why he’s a pathetic alien, we’d just like to give a hearty thanks to the inventors of the computer for that nifty copy/paste function. If we actually had to spell this guy’s name over and over instead of just pasting it wherever we needed it, this article would only feature four pathetic aliens. And who wants that?

OK, here’s why Mr. Mxyzptlk makes the list: he could have been so much more. He’s a five-dimensional alien from the Superman universe, with technology so unbelievably advanced, it looks like magic to our primitive 3-D eyes. As far as we’re concerned, he has the power of a god. He can float, disappear at will, make anything appear or disappear, re-arrange the molecules in somebody’s body to make them into whatever he wants, and can pretty much kill with the snap of his fingers. Theoretically, he could kill Superman at any time he wants to. All he has to do is show up, change Superman’s bone and molecular structure to pure Jell-O, and the Man of Steel is gone forever. Sounds easy, right?

Well, he never did that, and is basically relegated to a comedy act in most storylines. Why? Because he doesn’t want to kill Superman, he simply wants to annoy him. Basically, he’s a genius-level computer coding expert who prefers to use his powers to send pop-up infested malware via shady Facebook links because it’s just so damned hilarious when people open them and get naked pictures of old ladies uploaded to their profile. All the potential in the world, and it’s wasted on a glorified troll.

Also, his girlfriend is hotter than yours, to pile on the reasons to hate this guy

Mxyzptlk “fights” Superman by aggravating him, taunting him, and turning his adopted parents into a painting (which doesn’t kill them, oddly enough; must not have been lead paint) and the only way to make him go away to is to trick him into saying or spelling his goofy name backwards. Which happens. Quite often, in fact. To add to the uselessness of Mxyzptlk, he set the backwards-name stipulation up himself, and is now royally screwed over by it. It’s like Roger Clemens demanding to testify about steroids in front of Congress, and then mucking it all up by lying to said Congress about said steroids.